Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Valley 2 Beta .806 "Balancing Well With Others" Released!

This one has a lot of little stuff included in it, which add up to mainly polish and bugfixes.

Chief among the bugfixes are a bunch of improvements and fixes to multiplayer, making MP a vastly cleaner experience than it was before. At the moment I'm not personally aware of any outstanding issues in MP (although I'm sure there are some I'm not aware of yet), and in my testing today things seemed to go really well in MP even with our pretty-bad-lag simulator on.

There's a lot of graphical polish in this version: fifteen buildings, a number of monsters, etc. A lot of spell balance, too; including fixing up some spells like debris field that didn't work at all, and some spells like feather spray which didn't work conditionally. At the moment I'm not personally aware of any outstanding spells that flat-out don't work anymore. I think it's pretty well down to balance now.

On the strategic side, we've really improved the feel of things with the interface actually telling you what will be purified if you go onto any given tile. What a difference that makes even to me when I'm playing it; I know all the purification rules very well, but even so I was not really factoring those in my mind when I'd make strategic moves. Now I can, trivially, because the interface tells me what I need to know very quickly. That's pretty cool.

We've also made some shifts that stem from trying to balance Deep Gates without nerfing them so hard that they lose their fun factor. Going along with that comes some changes to how the scouting of auto-purified tiles work, and what triggers the deep gates, etc. I think this mechanic is now at least a lot closer to properly balanced.

I didn't manage to get in any more sound effects work today or yesterday, unfortunately, but I hope to tomorrow. Yesterday for me was a lot of work on footage for our upcoming trailer, plus other miscellany. Today for me was miscellany plus lots of banging away at the multiplayer code.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game. If you have the beta on Steam, it will automatically update for you. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have the standalone game, you can download that here. If you already own the first game, just use your existing license key to unlock the sequel for free!